It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die… Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.. —-
Oscar Wilde
I love to take something like Oscar said and start digging in it . I believe what Heidegger said… I think it was something like “Existential analysis has the character of doing violence, whether to the claims of everyday interpretation or to its complacency and tranquilized obviousness…” So get ready Oscar….
I am not quite sure how I cannot be the Other. The only examples of not being others are those stories of children who are brought up by wolves, none of them I believe survive well once they discover the Others…. All of us are trapped in the Others. It can be argued that even original thoughts are not original, they are built on some thought before or some connections someone made due to life experiences, some finding of one kind or another. I can imagine a 21st century teenager dropping by in to a day in the 1st. century, now there would be an original human…..
I am guessing Oscar is just frustrated with something… maybe he is watching the rest of us and believes we can do more to “claim our souls” — I would like to ask him what does a human like that look like? What does his/her days look like? Or maybe Oscar is just upset with himself… some standard he possibly set up for himself. Or maybe he showed up for himself – at the moment he said this – as a human “not good enough.” Well that is what being here is all about…. Not being good enough… We all have our projects.
We don’t have a choice Oscar… we are stuck being the Other, at best, another version or a newer one. I say enjoy it anyway.. nothing wrong with being the Other…
You’re quite right. Humans are not individual but colective creations.
And if you take the Buddha’s teachings this is not just a human thing but rather nothing is separate from nothing…
It’s true that we are the product of our environment, in that we expand through the channels already existing, but changes happen, at some level, this must be the individual pushing against with such force as to attract others to him, as to seem a collective. Original thought, in the face of the collective, might seem impossible, but I assure you, it happens every day…
Good post and quote… thank you! You have a regular reader on your hands.
I agree with this article very much so, but there is something to take into consideration. I believe that even though we are a product of our environment, we also all come from different environments. What I mean to say is that people have differences between each other, for example; different experiences, goals, limitations, cultural backgrounds, etc. And I think that because there are unlimited factors in our environment that make us up, there are unlimited combinations of those factors.
All of that to say, even though we are a product of our environment and no one’s thoughts, opinions, and otherwise are their own, there still can be individualism. Now is that agreeing with Wilde or the writer? I dunno, its just a thought.
T s eliot wrote a poem entitled “the love song of j alfred purfcock” {purfcock is misspelled)
a line of the poem goes like “the women come and go speaking of micheal anglelo”
even then, before television and the mass media transfixed the populace, we as humans are so suceptible to wanting to be like someone we are not….it’s sad
I think Oscar made a profound observation and one that is even more applicable today.
If you really want to know what Wilde thought the man looked like who truly possessed his own soul, go back and read the rest of “De Profundis”: he’s already told you. That man is Jesus. “Christ is the most supreme of individualists,” he writes. I think it is this, primarily, that drew him to Christ. At that point in his life, what he wanted most was to develop his individualism. And I think, especially in his unique and spiritually mature view on the lessons on prison, that he succeeded to a degree. Are we influenced by others? Yes. But it is possible to be something other than simply and only some Other? Yes.